Ballistic performance of angle-interlock woven fabrics

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ballistic performance of angle-interlock woven fabrics. Different fabric structures firstly have been compared to benchmark the ballistic performance of angle-interlock woven fabrics using the energy loss test. It has been shown that compared with other woven structures, angle-interlock woven fabric demonstrates low ballistic resistance as absorbing less impact energy. This is because angle-interlock woven fabric owns less interlacements than its counterparts. The interlacement plays an important role to help to transfer energy to the adjacent yarns: the more interlacements, the larger area the stress wave could propagate, and more projectile impact energy could be absorbed. After this systemic analysis of overall ballistic performance, more detailed parametric study of angle-interlock woven fabric is carried out. A group of 16 different structures have been tested and compared using the in-house firing range. The studies have revealed that the 3D angle-interlock woven fabric not only displays normal features of energy absorption mechanism, like yarn slippage, fibre fracture and cone formation, which 2D fabric usually demonstrates, but also shows the new property: the weaker gripping power on the constituent yarns. Besides, it also shows that the structural parameters of angle-interlock fabrics do not have a clear influence on the ballistic performance, due to the complicated factors which also have been theoretically explained from the four aspects: (a) the clamping state; (b) yarns hit by the projectile; (c) the impact angle of the projectile; (d) the impact velocity.